


you and me see how we are

by Timjan



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Background "Canon" Relationships, Bisexuality, Complicated Relationships, Crooked era, M/M, Near Infidelity, Open Relationship, POV Alternating, but also:, sexual fantasies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 12:58:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15641235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timjan/pseuds/Timjan
Summary: Unconsciously, Tommy smoothes a hand down his thigh. He only notices what he’s doing when Lovett breaks their eye contact to track the motion with his eyes. At that, Tommy becomes instantly hyper aware of the touch instead, wondering howLovett’shand on his thigh would feel. Yikes.





	you and me see how we are

**Author's Note:**

> This is set around May-ish 2018. 
> 
> **Warning:** This work contains some, uh, infidelity-adjacent behaviour.
> 
> Title from _Talk Tonight_ by Oasis.
> 
> Secret = safe.

_Might be hooking up tonight. Her name’s Eve, she’s an anthropologist. Can’t quite tell yet if she’s as smart as she seems or just good at bsing, so we’ll see._

With no one around to perform for, Jon still hides his disappointment in Pundit’s fur. When he got that message from Ronan, he’d been hoping for something more along the lines of “ _Do you want to join me in disgracing our intellects and political acumen with some Far Cry 5?_ ” rather than a reminder that he is home alone surfing Twitter on his sofa on a Saturday night, while his boyfriend (‘partner,’ Ronan’s voice in his head corrects him) is out meeting shiny new people. Oh well. Some other night it’ll be the other way round, and who’s keeping score anyway? Jon leans off the sofa to pick his phone back from where he’d dropped it on the floor, taps out, _How Biblical. Tell me when you know._

Jon’s thumb hovers over the ‘send’ button for a moment. He knows that Ronan will appreciate the hidden pun, but he usually writes longer texts and he doesn’t want to come off as standoffish or whatever. He knows that if the name in Ronan’s text had been ‘Adam’ and the pronouns ‘his’ and ‘he,’ he would have added something suggestive about snakes and/or forbidden fruits, but this is different and Jon hates that it is different but that doesn’t make it not so. As a compromise he adds an apple emoji, clicks send.

 _Will do_ , Ronan sends back immediately, a red heart tacked on at the end.

And Jon feels weirdly bad that this night will only include a silly movie and a bowl of ice cream (he’s not going out to buy sheet cake again, though, he’s just not), and not also jerking off imagining Ronan with a hot stranger, just because the hot stranger that Ronan’s with tonight is a woman and not a man. And this isn’t new, either. Jon knew Ronan was bisexual even before they started hooking up – thought he was straight at first, actually, which seems hilarious in hindsight – and when they decided to have an open relationship he knew that that would mean Ronan fucking women sometimes because that’s what bisexuals do and asking him not to would have put Jon on par with sleazy straight dudes that let their girlfriends have a girl on the side but flip out if she as much as looks at another guy, and Jon has enough lesbian friends to know that never works out well for anybody. And so, about one time in eight that Jon gets a text from Ronan about a potential hook up, it’s about a woman. Jon’s not counting, but he’s good at math.

\---

_So, you’re bisexual…_

Tommy’s just out of the shower, checking his phone more to tell the time (08:14 PM) than anything else. When he sees Lovett’s message he freezes up. For a moment his head is white noise and he’s intensely aware of a droplet of water running down his back. He had known this would come up again sooner or later, but he would have expected something less direct, especially after how they left things last time they spoke about Tommy’s sexual orientation. Still, Lovett’s gonna Lovett. Tommy forces himself to relax before he decides what to write back.

He settles on _That I am. How come?_ and clicks send, a little wary but determined not to joke this off if Lovett wants to have a real conversation.

_I have a question about your kind. Doing some anthropology research, if you will. Can I call you?_

So, something serious then. (Tommy appreciates Lovett not just calling him, though – it’s bad enough when he calls out of the blue just to chat, calling to put Tommy on the spot regarding his sexual orientation would have been the worst.) Tommy considers for a moment. Hanna’s out of town for the weekend and he _had_ been planning to get some work done tonight, but he is really pretty much on top of things and everybody he knows is always telling him to take more time off.

_You can come over. Bring wine. And Pundit._

\---

It’s almost nine when Lovett shows up. When Tommy opens his door the first thing he sees is the bottle that Lovett is holding up to his face: a red wine that Tommy had gotten from Winc once, and suggested that Lovett might like. Tommy smiles, and when he meets Lovett’s eyes from behind the bottle he’s smiling too. As is Pundit, sitting by his feet.

“Hiya, Tommy,” Lovett says. “Surprised I came through?”

There’s always at best a 50/50 chance that Lovett will do what he’s been asked to do, so the question is not unreasonable. But apparently Lovett is setting himself up to be agreeable tonight. Tommy doesn’t know if that bodes well for their conversation or if it should make him worried, but he takes the bottle, and goes into the kitchen to get things ready. Then he goes upstairs and gets Lucca, holds her in his arms as he approaches Pundit with the same wariness he felt when answering Jon’s first text. The two dogs have a complicated relationship, and even though Lucca’s no longer smaller than Pundit, Pundit is still definitely the top dog, and she can be rough when she wants to be. Today the two angels seem to get along, though, so Tommy lets Lucca go and she and Pundit race off into the apartment to get into some sort of mischief together.

When Tommy gets back into the kitchen the wine’s no longer where he left it to breathe, so he goes through to the living room, where he finds that Lovett has already made himself comfortable on the sofa: shoes off, feet up, wine glass in one hand, phone in the other. He looks up and smiles when Tommy enters the room. It’s a polite smile that puts Tommy on edge, probably the opposite of its intended effect. Tommy breathes in, lets the feeling go.

“Hello, buddy,” he says, though he already greeted Lovett when he first arrived.

“Buddy,” Lovett echoes, the slightest hint of mockery in his voice, but he doesn’t say anything else, just pours another glass of wine and holds it up into the air in Tommy’s direction.

Tommy takes it, chuckling, and sits down.

“So, what exactly is it that we’re going to talk about?” he asks, smelling the wine. “Your ‘anthropology research’?”

“It’s about Ronan,” Lovett says.

Ah.

\---

Tommy hadn’t really meant to come out to Ronan way back in 2012, but the thing about Ronan Farrow is that he asks incisive fucking questions. That’s what makes him such a great journalist, nowadays. Tommy has some of the best training to wriggle out of incisive fucking questions, though, so it generally works out fine. He still hasn’t told Ronan the story behind Favs sometimes calling him ‘Tom,’ for example. However, pivoting away from Ronan’s “perhaps it’s time for you to get back in the dating game” to accidentally coming out as maybe-probably-bisexual might not have been one of Tommy’s best ever evasive maneuvers. He’d just given Ronan a different scoop than the one he’d been looking for. And of course Ronan knowing meant that Lovett would find out, sooner or later. Tommy _could_ have asked Ronan to keep it quiet, but that would have meant making a big deal out of it. And it’s not. Which, of course, is why he ended up having a huge fight with Lovett about it.

About two weeks ago, Lovett had shown up at Tommy’s house unannounced at seven in the evening, and he had been _angry_. Lovett believes in fighting face to face but hates fighting in front of other people, which means that he can go a whole day chewing over some grievance and not let anything show until you’re alone with him, when he’ll suddenly tear into you with abandon. It also means that if he has something to discuss with you, he might show up at your house unannounced. (Though it’s not like he’s great at announcing that he’s coming over even when he’s in the best of moods.)

“Are you straight?” Lovett had asked in an accusatory tone, standing in Tommy’s doorway, buzzing with enraged energy like a small, angry bee.

Tommy’s mind had run through a dozen possible ways to reply as he waved Lovett in, settling on, “What’s this coming from?”

Lovett had scoffed, arms crossed over his chest, one step and one step only into Tommy’s hallway.

“Just answer, Tommy, it’s a straight enough question! Even if you aren’t. Apparently.”

So he had obviously already known the answer.

“How did you find out?” Tommy had asked, even though he had suspected that he, too, already knew the answer.

“Ronan let it slip,” Lovett had said, uncrossing his arms to give a dismissive shrug.

Tommy still sincerely doubts that. Ronan Farrow doesn’t let things slip; Tommy has always appreciated the careful way he chooses his words. And it’s even less likely that Ronan would suddenly let something slip out of nowhere six years after he first learned of it. Something must have made him decide that it was time for Lovett to know about Tommy’s… sexual ambiguity. Tommy should probably take that up with Ronan, but he’s been putting it off. (Kind of like how he’d been putting off telling Lovett in the first place.)

Back then, Tommy hadn’t replied, and Lovett had gone on into a full-on rant.

“More to the point, _how_ have you never told me this? I’m your best gay friend, am I not? The main reason you have _other_ gay friends too, right? I’ve lived my life blissfully believing that if you ever felt the faintest stirring of sexual and/or romantic interest in another man, I’d be the first person you’d tell. But no! You’re not just bicurious, noooo, you’re straight up bi _sexual_ , a bona fide LGBT ‘B’, a… a… a never mind, I can’t come up with anything funny, I’m too angry. I mean, you’ve let me make a fool of myself by calling you a straight bro so many times. On air! You’ve let me _treat_ you like a straight bro, when I should’ve… should’ve…”

And that had been where Tommy cut him short by grabbing him by the arm, forcing him to look at him, to break out of rant space.

“If you change the way you treat me over this,” he’d said, surprising himself with the sharp evenness of his tone, “that’ll be proof that I made the right choice when I didn’t tell you.”

He had used the Voice, the one he’d inherited from his father, the one he’d only used on reporters when he _really_ needed them to listen. Lovett had shut right up and gone limp in Tommy’s grip, which had been tight enough to feel his pulse at first, and then slowly loosening as they’d stood in silence for a minute and a half, not really looking at each other, until Tommy let go of Lovett’s bicep completely and rubbed his hands down his sides instead.

“Does Jon know?” Lovett had asked at last, voice small.

“Of course not, I’d never tell him something like that without telling you.”

Tommy has a fully functional self-preservation instinct, and he also likes being considerate. That had somehow been the wrong thing to say, though.

“But you told _Ronan_? Look, I’m happy you get along with my boyfriend, but Favs is your _best friend_.”

And just like that, Tommy had been annoyed again.

“Oh come on, Jon! You can’t see any reason why… why bisexuality might have come up with Ronan specifically?”

Tommy’s still proud that his voice hadn’t even wavered on the word ‘bisexuality’. And that, that time, he’d held Lovett’s gaze until Lovett looked away and said, “Who else knows? Does Hanna know?”

“Oh my god, Lovett, of course Hanna knows. That’s a whole different thing!”

And then Hanna had returned home from her walk with Lucca, only marginally surprised at finding Lovett in her home, and they’d turned their fight into a social call. Since then they’d been handling it by not talking about it, which had suited Tommy just fine. He would have preferred it to go on like that for at least a few more weeks. And still, here they are.

\---

Now that he’s actually in Tommy’s apartment (on Tommy’s tasteful grey sofa, with Tommy looking at him expectantly over his wine glass) Jon finds himself a little nervous. Ridiculous. He sips his wine – it’s actually really good – to stall for time.

When he sent his text to Tommy earlier tonight he had thought of it like ripping off a band aid, but now (with Tommy just a few feet away from him on the sofa, legs crossed straight dude-style, arm stretched out on the backrest towards Jon) he’s not so sure that’s the best idea. He thinks about the way he and Tommy get very careful with each other sometimes, when talking about the military, about America’s role in the world; two people who know each other well and want to work together to avoid a fight but also know that any wrong step still might lead to a tumble. That carefulness is always worse when it’s about things that are important not to the country or the world but to them, personal things, but then it’s usually Jon’s own stupid insecurities that get in the way. Now it is _Tommy_ not wanting to talk about something that, Jon can’t stop himself from thinking, ruefully, he _shouldn’t_ find it difficult to talk to Jon – of all people! – about. And there it is, the flicker of anger that he wants to avoid. Fuck. He doesn’t want to have to be careful, but he also doesn’t want Tommy to freeze up and go all monotone on him again, either.

The problem is, Jon doesn’t know exactly what the problem is. They usually have no more problem talking about personal business than any two decade-old friends would. It can be fucking awkward, sure, but you soldier through it because friends are, among other things, for telling you hard shit you need to hear. And Tommy’s usually decent at both dishing it and taking it. He had been the one to sit Jon down, that last summer in D.C., and tell him to make things official with Ronan before moving to LA, to not let a good thing slip through his fingers. He hadn’t straight up mentioned Katie, but Jon could read between the lines. And well, maybe that’s the thing; Tommy prefers talk about his life fucking _obliquely_ , from the side, forcing you to read between the lines, to put two and two together. Which is exactly why the Ronan angle might work, really.

“Okay, here we go,” Jon says, throwing himself into it band aid-style after all. “So. Ronan’s on a date tonight.”

Tommy’s mouth twitches in that way it does whenever Jon and/or Ronan mentions something about the openish polyish aspect of their relash, but he doesn’t say anything. Jon has never interrogated that mouth twitch, and he doesn’t want to do it now either (though he realizes of course that this night might go in that direction). He wishes Pundit was in his lap so he could hide a little behind rubbing her ears, but she’s off somewhere leaving beige hairs on a beige rug, probably. (Jon loves Lucca, but he still thinks Tommy and Hanna should have gotten a goldendoodle too – it would have matched their aesthetic much better.)

“Ronan’s on a date,” Jon repeats, starting over, overwriting Tommy’s mouth twitch. “With a woman.”

“Okay.” Tommy’s voice is carefully neutral, but Tommy’s voice is often carefully neutral. Jon has learned not to read into it. (Much.)

“And it got me thinking.”

“About bisexuality.”

“Yeah. About bisexuality. I guess you could say I’m a little bi-curious.”

Tommy’s face does something complicated but it ends in him grinning, so it’s fine by Jon.

“Alright-y, then,” says Tommy (because he says dweeby things like that sometimes, seemingly without a trace of irony but maybe that’s the joke, maybe he’s an expert at post-irony or whatever the word is). “I’ll try to sate your curiosity, but I should warn you that I’m probably not the best person to ask about this, Jon. First off, if this is really about Ronan you should probably just talk to him, you know? But I also think you have other bisexual friends who could answer your questions better.”

That might be true, but Jon doesn’t like to show his vulnerabilities to just any Tom, Dick or Harry, and if he can turn to someone in his closest circle about something, he will. (Also, he’s been waiting for an excuse to talk about this with Tommy.)

“Well, you’re my closest bisexual friend,” he says. And then, before he can stop himself, he adds, “Apparently.”

 _Ooops._ There was definitely some bitterness there. And Tommy clearly noticed, judging by the way his brow furrows the slightest bit, the way he shifts in his seat so that he turns away from Jon just a smidge, the way he lifts his hand from the backrest and rests it against the back of his neck instead. Goddammit.

“An honorable distinction, I’m sure,” Tommy says, with a laugh that only sounds a little forced.

“And one of my very best friends period. Obviously. Which is why it’s so _strange_ that you get so twitchy about talking about this, I don’t get it, how could you think I’d be anything but fucking _delighted_ …”

“ _Lovett_ …” Tommy says; a warning.

“Yes, yes. Letting it go right now. I’m straight up Idina Menzel over here,” Jon replies quickly, adding a twirly Queen Elsa hand gesture for good measure.

Tommy raises his eyebrows but doesn’t laugh. Still on edge, then.

“Just ask whatever your question was,” he says. Carefully neutral, again.

Jon tries for normal.

“Okay,” he says, “here goes. So. Bisexual: you like both men and women, right? And, like, other people who don’t feel like they fit the confines of those categories, but… Well, I’m thinking 101 level, here, men and women. Is there, like, a difference? In, uh, _how_ you like them?”

He’s talking too fast, he knows, which he does often but especially when he’s nervous, and has been drinking, and isn’t in front of a mike or an audience that remind him to slow down. Tommy refills his own wineglass while Jon speaks, and when he’s done he looks at Jon intently, that small furrow back between his brows, until Jon looks away, uncomfortable with the eye contact.

“What do you mean?” asks Tommy simply.

“Like, when you look at a hot woman, does it feel the same as when you see a hot man? Or, like, do you flirt with them the same way? Things like that, I guess. I mean, when I see a hot woman it’s very different from when I see a hot man, obviously, like, I can tell she’s hot but…” Jon shrugs. “I don’t want to fuck her, obviously. But then again I don’t want to fuck all objectively hot men either… Anyway, maybe for you it is more like, depending on the person more than the gender? That’d make sense too I suppose.”

Now it’s Tommy’s turn to shrug.

“No, it’s different, for me,” he says. “Which is why… Uh. That is, I don’t know what it’d be like in some sort of sociological experiment, a controlled study, but in real life, there are different… dynamics or whatever, that make things different. Not that I know much about it. I really mean it, Lovett, I’m absolutely not the right person for you to talk about this with. And regardless I still can’t speak for Ronan, obviously.”

“Yeah, yeah, caveats, caveats. You sound like a fact checker.”

Tommy puts his hand to his heart and gasps in deep mock hurt. Jon feels laughter bubble out of him, partly because that was funny, and partly because it means Tommy’s letting his guard down.

“So, you wanna tell me why you’re not the right person for this talk?” Jon asks, all faux nonchalance that Tommy will see through like saran-wrap but might still appreciate the idea of.

Tommy gives him a calculating look, that old how-much-information-can-I-slash-do-I-want-to-give-you-exactly?-look that doesn’t come out to play much these days but is still achingly familiar, it turns out. Then he takes a deep breath, holds it for a moment, and says, “I’ve only kissed one guy. Once. And never anything… beyond that.”

Jon’s first though is ‘That can’t be right.’ His second is ‘Well, that makes sense.’ What he says out loud is, “Not even a single quickly done, quickly repressed handjob in the showers at WASP High?” (Because Jon momentarily can’t remember the name of Tommy’s high school and it’s funnier this way anyway.)

Tommy gives a surprised laugh.

“That kind of thing doesn’t actually happen in real life, Lovett,” he says. Then after a moment, he adds, thoughtful, “At least they’ve never happened to me. I suppose I can’t speak for every high school locker room.”

Jon can’t speak for his high school locker room either, really; he spent as little time there as he possibly could, and when he couldn’t get out of it he always did his best to not even look at his classmates, much less touch any of them.

Anyway. Jon’s generally all about getting side tracked, but sad gay high school memories are not the side track he wants to go down right now, even as he realizes that the main track of trying to get some roundabout insight into his partner’s psyche probably won’t lead anywhere either. Still, getting some more straightforward insight into one of his best friends’ psyche is nothing to sneeze at, and there are a lot of questions Jon wants to ask Tommy right now. He settles on, “So, if you’ve never really, uh, ‘acted on it,’ does that mean this whole bisexuality thing is, like, new?”

\---

God, it’s _so_ uncomfortable to talk about this without any preparation whatsoever. Tommy finds it uncomfortable to talk about anything without being properly prepared, really, but this is especially horrific. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says, “I, uh… that’s – ok, look, th-this is why I haven’t told you; whenever I try to come up with something to say about all this, it sounds super shitty in my head.”

Lovett throws him a quick look, shifting position on the couch.

“Just answer the question, Tommy, jeez. How long have you known you’re bi?”

Tommy shifts a little himself, takes a breath, contemplates trying to bow out somehow, but: in for a penny, in for a pound.

“Okay. Okay. So, in one way I have, like, always known. And it’s just never been rele-… never been a… big deal.”

Lovett doesn’t answer, so after a moment Tommy goes on.

“And that already probably sounds pretty shitty to you because being gay is, like, this huge part of who you are, and… well.”

Tommy falls silent again, and this time he waits Lovett out, looking up at the ceiling so Lovett won’t feel put on the spot.

“What does ‘in one way always known’?” Lovett asks at last, his voice surprisingly soft.

Tommy looks over at him. He _looks_ surprisingly soft too, kind of like he looks sometimes in the photographs that Ronan takes of him. It startles Tommy a little and he looks away, lets his eyes wander over his and Hanna’s bookshelves, resting on familiar, well-loved volumes.

“It means…” Tommy pauses, collects his thoughts, considers how much information to give out, how best to phrase it. “Hm. Well, when I was like, eight, I remember wondering why men never married men and women never married women. And I figured it had something to do with having children maybe but when people talked about marriage they always talked mostly about love and _surely_ men could fall in love with men…” He trails off.

“Cute story,” Lovett cuts into Tommy’s silence, before he has time to trail back on. “So when did you realize you’re bi?”

Tommy lets that rile him up a little, because maybe being riled up will make this conversation a little easier to handle.

“Look, I don’t have a specific fucking date, alright? I considered it from time to time and thought like ‘yeah, probably’ and then I forgot about it or didn’t think about it for a while.”

“Since when?”

“I dunno, first time I thought about it in these terms I was… fourteen, maybe? Twelve? And then I thought I’d get around to, like, ‘experiment’ or whatever in college but nothing really came of it –”

“– pity –”

“– and then I found myself working for a Senator and, well. It was a different time back then, you remember. And I guess _you_ sort of… had to deal with that, but I didn’t, so I… didn’t. Plus I was really fucking busy.”

“You’re right,” Lovett says, suddenly a little terse, a little tension in his back, in his legs as he sits curled up in the bend of the sofa. “Things _were_ different back then. People coming out was what helped change things.”

“I know.”

Tommy knows. He knows that an openly bi government spokesperson would have meant a lot to a lot of people. He knows that he was perfectly placed in time to be that person. Their generation is a weird one, when it comes to mild-to-moderate queerness. If Tommy had been ten years older he probably wouldn’t ever even have admitted that he was interested in guys even to himself. If he’d been ten years younger, he probably would have been out already when he first started working for Obama. But here he is, in between. And on the one hand it does suck to know of, well, things that he’d like to do but never get to do them, but on the other hand he loves Hanna and wants to be with her for the rest of his life. And he can’t deny that it’s a relief to never have to deal with publicly coming out, to weigh strategies and struggle with different levels of disclosure the way Ronan does. But it’s not in his best interest to bring that up with Lovett now, so instead he reaches for an old, forgotten bitterness. It leaps back into consciousness with surprising ease.

“I guess I just didn’t feel like it was worth it to come out just to get rejected for being an emotional mess by men as well as women,” he says.

Lovett scoffs.

“Well, it’s not like you’d have to be _out_ for that, not out for real anyway. There are a lot of closeted people in Washington who still manages to have _very_ active sex lives and you know it.”

Tommy does know that too, from living with Lovett if nothing else. And still, imagining a photo of him drunk and shirtless, kissing a guy, instead of drunk and shirtless, playing a stupid game… Tommy doesn’t know if he could have handled it. Working with the press the way he’s done, he’s learned to appreciate being able to control the image you project into the world, being able to control what people know and what they don’t, being able to pass under the radar. That’s another thing he can’t really say to Lovett, who actually has to take _actual paparazzi_ into consideration when he’s out with Ronan.

“But that’s the point, Jon,” he says, instead. “I _had_ a sex life. I was always happy with… with women, with Katie… I had no reason to, like… branch out.”

“Branch out,” Lovett repeats with an incredulous giggle.

Tommy shrugs, and nearly spills from his newly refilled wineglass. Shit.

“Whatever. See why I don’t like talking about this?”

“Just finish up the story, then.”

Tommy hums, and puts down his wineglass, takes a moment to collect himself, run through what he wants to say.

“Well… So, after Katie I didn’t really date for a few years, _as you know_ , and then when I got back into it I was only just starting to consider, like… adding men to the pool or whatever, when I met Hanna and it became a moot point.”

Lovett takes a deep breath, opens his mouth, and then closes it again, breathing out slowly through his nose.

“Okay, then.”

Tommy appreciates his restraint, and they sit for a while, neither of them speaking, nor drinking, just letting the silence become comfortable. When it feels like something has settled inside Tommy, he speaks again.

“And, you know, I’ve never been to Pride or anything,” he says. “So, yeah, I’m technically bisexual but I’m, like…”

“Culturally straight?” Lovett supplies, in a tone Tommy can’t quite read. It sounds like he’s sharing an inside joke with himself, maybe? “Anyways, so what is it that makes you bi _sexual_ and not just bi _curious_ , then?”

“‘Bicurious’ is a bullshit term for bullshitters,” Tommy shoots back.

Lovett starts at his vehemence, then laughs.

“Spoken like a true bisexual,” he accedes, his face exploding into a big, goofy grin.

Tommy smiles back at him, a little cautious. This is… nice. This is like what he’d hoped for when he’d imagined telling Lovett; what people mean when they talk about the importance of community, he supposes.

“To be fair I sort of… hinted at it, at times,” he says, because he had, on Twitter and in conversations and even sort of on the pods.

“You did?”

“Too subtly, probably.”

\---

Lovett, with surprising grace, changes the subject then, and they talk about other stuff for a while – the state of the world, next week’s episodes of their various pods, The Handmaid’s tale – the wine bottle emptying between them. The two of them mostly don’t hang out on their own just to hang out, but when they do there’s always something nostalgic about it, to Tommy. Re-living their DC days, in a way, he supposes. He thinks of it like that, sometimes, at least. He doesn’t know if Lovett does too. In many ways they’re closer now than they were back then, sharing a podcasting empire and an office, but they have lost some of that easy intimacy you get from living with someone. Tommy has that with Hanna now, of course, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t sometimes miss having it with Lovett. He misses having it with Favs too, for that matter. And he’s a little jealous at the way that Lovett and Favs seem to have something similar, even though they’ve never actually lived together…

Tommy doesn’t even notice that he’s gone quiet with contemplation until the dogs show up again, Pundit racing into the room and up into Lovett’s lap with Lucca close at her heals. Tommy looks up at the commotion, shaking his head to clear it, and out of the corner of his eye he notices Lovett startling and looking away from him with the air of someone being caught staring. Tommy calls Lucca over, and gives both himself and Lovett a moment to focus on their dogs and collect their thoughts.

When Tommy’s satisfied that his girl is happy and hale, he looks over at the coffee table, and notices that the wine bottle is empty. That won’t do. Tommy throws back the last of the wine in his glass like a shot and Lovett first laughs at him, then does the same.

“You have anything else to drink?” Lovett asks, his voice half muffled by him sticking his face in Pundit’s fur. (That dog sure has the patience of an angel, if not the voice.) “I could die for some tequila. I don’t even know why, what a weird craving! Maybe I’m pregnant. Hm, can pregnancy make someone crave alcohol? Very counter productive, in that case, seeing as you can’t actually drink when you’re knocked up…”

So Lovett’s a little drunk.

“Don’t think I have any tequila, sorry,” Tommy says, laughing. “I do have whiskey, though.”

Jon scrunches up his nose.

“Oh well, I’ll take it.”

When Tommy hands him a tumbler with a finger of whiskey in it a few minutes later, Lovett immediately knocks it back as if it really was tequila, and pours himself a new, fuller glass. Then they sit in silence for a while. Tommy’s swirls the liquor around in his glass, taking a sip every now and then. Lovett seems intent on getting as drunk as possible as quickly as he can, for some reason. Tommy doesn’t want to lag too far behind, but he also isn’t in quite such a rush towards wasted.

“So the dude you kissed, who was it?” Lovett asks, sudden and loud, startling both Pundit and Tommy.

“A friend,” Tommy hedges.

“Anyone I know?”

Lovett has met Franklin a few times, but Tommy wouldn’t say they know each other. He also wouldn’t answer that question regardless.

“I don’t kiss and tell,” he says primly.

Lovett shoots him an incredulous look, but Tommy is saved from hearing whatever scathing remark he had been on the verge of uttering by Lovett’s phone buzzing from down between two of the sofa’s cushions. Lovett fishes it out with some apparent trepidation, and makes a face at whatever text he’s just received. Then he throws back the rest of his whiskey, before typing out a reply with forceful jabs of his thumbs. Tommy doesn’t ask whatever that was about, but he grabs for the whiskey bottle to put it away before Lovett can get the idea to refill his glass again.

When Tommy gets back from the liquor cabinet Lovett clears his throat, throws a quick glance over at Tommy, and says, faux casual, “I just don’t get how you’ve known you’re bisexual for _ages_ and never really acted on it.”

“It’s surprisingly easy to go through life and not fuck men,” replies Tommy, the alcohol in his veins making it easier to say things like ‘fuck men’ out loud.

“Huh. Easy but boring, I’d imagine.”

Lovett’s not wrong, probably. If there had been a simple and easy way for Tommy to add having sex with men to his life, he’s sure he would have enjoyed it.

“You’re probably right.”

Lovett laughs at that, for some reason, and holds Tommy’s gaze for longer than he usually does. Unconsciously, Tommy smoothes a hand down his thigh. He only notices what he’s doing when Lovett breaks their eye contact to track the motion with his eyes. At that, Tommy becomes instantly hyper aware of the touch instead, wondering how _Lovett’s_ hand on his thigh would feel. Yikes.

Tommy made an uneasy peace with his body – the physicality of it, the reality of embodied existence – years ago, in a way Lovett seems to never have been able to and Favs seems to never have needed to. But now something like the old feeling creeps up on him, an itching under his skin, a tugging at his ribs, flowering into a full blown need to burst out of himself, to turn inside out and disappear in an impossible Möbius twist as his skin sets itself on fire. It’s not pleasant and it’s not welcome and it’s nothing like what he feels for Hanna but he does recognize it for what it is: sexual attraction. Sexuality coils through his spine and stretches out into his legs to make them shake, and Tommy excuses himself to the bathroom.

\---

Jon would never admit to believing in such a thing as ‘energies,’ but he’d still been able to feel the energy in the room palpably change before Tommy left to pee, and it had shook him out of his self-pitying contemplation of the _I’ve been invited up for [coffee emoji] and said yes. Do you want further updates tonight?_ -message he’d gotten from Ronan, and the _Nah, you can catch me up tomorrow. Have fun!_ that he had sent back. Now he contemplates Tommy instead – the new (well, new to Jon), bisexual Tommy that Jon has avoided play flirting with for the last three weeks because it would feel too real, now. The Tommy that had looked at Jon with obvious lust in his eyes, pupils slowly dilating in a horridly sexy way, and then fled the room.

“What the hell was that?” Jon asks Pundit.

Pundit doesn’t answer, she just looks at him, squirming a little. Jon lets her go so she can run off in search of Lucca, who had disappeared together with Tommy. Jon resists an urge to go with her, and then another urge to flee like Tommy had fled, to order a Lyft and be gone before Tommy’s sense of hospitality forces him to leave his temporary refuge. Jon grabs his phone instead, and, after briefly considering texting Ronan about this strange development of his night, gets on Twitter.

When Tommy returns, the whiskey bottle is back in his hand and the dogs are at his feet.

“Welcome back,” Jon says, looking up from his phone.

Tommy clears his throat and looks away. When he takes a seat again, it’s as far away from Jon on the sofa as possible. He sits with his back ramrod straight, his arms crossed in his lap. His brows are furrowed.

Jon sighs. So it’s up to him to get them out of this awkwardness, then. Well, he likes nothing more than grabbing bulls by their horns.

“So, what the hell was that about?” he asks, repeating his question to Pundit from before.

“Me peeing?” Tommy asks back, looking at the dogs’ play-fighting instead of at Jon.

Jon rolls his eyes, but doesn’t say anything. He lets the silence stretch out instead, almost unbearably awkward and _not_ made better by the sounds of their dogs basically making out on the floor. Jon almost wishes for things to sour between them the way they sometimes do, just to get an excuse to get up, to get out.

Suddenly, Tommy turns sharply towards Jon. His cheekbones catch the light in an interesting way, and Jon reminds himself that he doesn’t believe in changing energies.

“I don’t want –” Tommy starts out, fierce, but then he deflates, falls back onto the backrest _exactly_ like a puppet with its strings cut. “You know what, never mind.”

He sounds so wrung out that Jon’s throat instantly threatens to close up.

“No. _Do_ mind!” he forces out before it does.

Tommy opens the bottle of whiskey and lifts it to his lips, taking a swig straight from it. It’s so un-Tommy-like that Jon gasps, even as he keeps his eyes locked on the movement of Tommy’s throat as he swallows.

“Maybe you’re right,” Tommy says slowly, then, eyes on the ceiling. “Maybe I should have –” he lifts his hands, one of them still holding the bottle, in finger quotes “– ‘experimented’ more before settling down.”

Jon does not remember suggesting that, but sure. _Sure._

“I would happily have volunteered, you know,” he says, drunk and a little angry. It’s a joke, but it’s also not: that’s how Jon flirts and it has gotten him laid many times – and it has gotten him Ronan! – and it’s exactly what Tommy deserves for bringing things back to sex.

Tommy flinches, and Jon feels guilty, but there’s no taking back what he said so he just lifts his chin and stares Tommy down. Tommy straightens up again under his gaze, mirrors Jon’s stubborn mien.

Usually when you talk to Tommy his eyes shift all over the place, checking in on you every once in a while and then away again, but when Tommy holds your gaze he _holds_ it. It’s like nothing can really keep his attention unless he gives it his full and entire focus. The thought of that focus in a sexual setting is… Well.

“Yeah, we could have fucked back in, like, 2010,” Tommy says, still not breaking eye contact. “And we would _not_ have been here today.”

“Bullshit,” Jon replies, automatically. “We would have worked through it like _champs_ and come through to the other side all the better for it, our friendship strengthened by the increased intimacy.”

“Mmm, yes, it would not have been weird at all.” Tommy’s voice drips with sarcasm. “Very practical to have a live-in fuckbuddy, makes it so simple to make a booty call.”

Jon’s breath hitches. He looks down at the floor.

“Ah, yes, that, uh, could have blurred the lines a little perhaps,” he admits, feeling himself flush.

He reaches for the whiskey bottle, and Tommy wordlessly hands it to him. When Jon drinks from it he purposefully _doesn’t_ think about how it just touched Tommy’s lips. He’s helped by the distraction of Pundit jumping back up on the sofa; Lucca has fallen asleep on the floor. Jon nods his head towards her to get Tommy to notice, and has the privilege of seeing Tommy’s eyes go soft, his shoulders relaxing a fraction.

“Seems like it’s time for us to leave,” Jon says, carefully modulating his voice to ‘normal.’

“Yeah,” agrees Tommy. He mostly sounds tired.

Jon picks Pundit up, puts his phone in his pocket. He’ll order his Lyft once he’s outside.

“Good night, Tommy,” he says softly. “We can find our way out ourselves.”

Tommy doesn’t argue; he just gives Jon and Pundit a dorky little wave that makes Jon grin despite himself.

Jon knows that they’ll have to revisit this conversation some day soon, preferably while _not drunk_ , but for tonight this is an acceptable détente. So he waves back at Tommy, a little clumsily with his arms full of dog, and leaves.

\---

In bed that night, Jon picks up the thread of the fantasy that he and Tommy had spun, mostly unspoken, between them, of having fucked back when they were roommates (after Katie and before Hanna, less complicated than imagining something happening now, Jon doesn’t think, doesn’t let himself think).

Sex fantasies, for Jon, are generally all about the narrative. So he builds his and Tommy’s old D.C. apartment up around him like a set, with that wistful feeling one gets when remembering a home one no longer lives in, that no longer exists. He takes care to render the living room wallpaper the exact right shade of horrible yellow that both he and Tommy always hated but never did anything about, important government officials with no time for home renovation projects. Then he undoes all that work by making it night time, the color of the wallpaper melting into the shadows, the only light in the room coming from Jon’s laptop screen as he sits on that huge soft brown couch that he still misses, a gift from Tommy’s parents, the most comfortable couch that Jon’s ever had.

Jon decides that he’s been out having a few beers with Favs and – whoever, it doesn’t matter for the fantasy, the point is that Tommy had been supposed to come with them, but he’d been called into the Situation Room right when they’d been about to leave the White House, and when Jon had stumbled into their apartment forty-five minutes ago Tommy still hadn’t been home. So now Jon’s waiting up, half-assedly working on some nondescript insignificant speech assignment, to see if Tommy will manage to get home before the clock tips over to midnight. He’s in sweatpants and a hoodie – _Tommy’s_ hoodie, he decides, because that _did_ happen a few times and it adds flavor to the fantasy.

Jon hardly even touches himself as he builds up the scenario, only pets himself on the insides on his bare thighs, drawing circles and spirals and figure eights and then lightly grazing his fingers over his dick – hard but not yet aching – through his underwear from time to time, reminding himself of what’s coming. Sometimes the fantasy jumps ahead of him, slips him a ghost impression of a dick in his mouth or a hand on his ass, or an image of himself lying back on Tommy’s old bed, and he catches himself pawing at himself harder, sticking his hands down his boxers. Each time he slows himself down, intent on doing this right; he rests his hands at his sides and goes back to imagining the apartment door opening and closing, the sounds of Tommy taking off his shoes and then Tommy showing up in the door to the living room.

“You’re wearing my hoodie,” he greets Jon.

The line comes to Jon’s mind unbidden but not unwelcome – he knew it had been a good idea to add the detail of the hoodie, his real dick twitching at fantasy-Tommy’s words, Tommy’s voice always easy for Jon to remember and imagine, softer back then than it is now, with a sweet waver to it that he misses sometimes these days, but with a teasing lilt to it that comes out to play more nowadays than it did back then. It doesn’t sound tired and strained the way it probably would have done if Jon’s imagined scenario had been an actual memory.

Back in the fantasy, Jon glances up at Tommy, says, “So they let you out of the Sit Room at last.”

Tommy nods, leaning against the door frame the way he used to do when he hadn’t decided whether he was going to enter the living room or continue on to his room or the kitchen. Jon takes care to imagine Tommy’s form in more detail than he usually does when picturing people: he has him wear a non-descript work shirt with his tie loosened a little around his neck. Jon makes it that green tie that he always liked, which Tommy must have gotten tired of or maybe ruined with some blackberry jam or something because he never wears it anymore, but never mind, not important, back to the fantasy. Back to building Tommy up, straining his memory to make him as tall as ever but younger, with less lines in his face but darker rings under his eyes. And if Jon adds a few of now-Tommy’s muscles to then-Tommy’s body, having him fill out that old non-descript shirt a little more than he actually did back then, then whatever, no ones going to report him to the Fantasy Police. Once Jon’s happy with Tommy’s form, he has Tommy enter the living room, throw himself down on the couch, sinking into the soft pillows.

“What are you working on?” he asks Jon with a yawn. “Is it important?”

“Not really.”

“So why are you still up, then?”

“I was waiting for you,” Jon says simply, and delights in having his fantasy-Tommy go a little pink even as that probably shouldn’t be visible in the lighting conditions he’s chosen for his scene.

“You shouldn’t have,” Tommy says.

Jon catches his gaze and holds it in a way he never would have done in real life. Then, suddenly a little bored with the fantasy, Jon fast forwards to Tommy leaning back on the couch stripped to his undershirt (his shirt and tie thrown over the back of their one, very uncomfortable, armchair that Jon doesn’t miss at all) regaling Jon with one of those heavily redacted tales from the Sit Room that were never as interesting as Jon thought they would be when he pestered Tommy to tell them, probably because they mostly consisted of things like “a general sneezed right when he was making an important point” or “POTUS made a really funny comment that you would love but I can’t tell you what it was because it concerned classified information.” Jon doesn’t even care to make something up now, just plays himself a soft murmur of Tommy-like noises that he has his fantasy self humming at every now and again.

Then, of the fantasy’s own volition, Tommy shivers in the middle of some more emphatic murmuring.

“Are you cold?” Jon asks.

Tommy doesn’t look at him when he replies, “Nah, I’m probably just tired. I should go to bed – not that I’ll be able to sleep, probably.”

“Maybe I can help you relax,” fantasy-Jon replies.

Reality-Jon winces as the inane line, but he doesn’t really care to make this original or realistic anymore, he just wants to get off; he has his dick in his hand now, stroking himself dry. That’s how it tends to go with these fantasies he spins himself – the longer they go on, and the closer Jon gets to coming, the less detailed, and more stupid, they get. So he decides to go with it, to let his fantasy self slide to the floor between Tommy’s knees as his real self grabs for the lube he keeps in his bedside drawer.

Jon sticks three fingers of his unoccupied hand in his mouth as he imagines sucking Tommy off, looking up at him where he sits with his head leaning back against the horrendous wallpaper, his undershirt somehow magically gone, cold be damned, so Jon can see the deep blush spreading across his chest, up the curve of his throat. Tommy swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and his hand in Jon’s hair shakes a little. Then he tilts his head down to lock eyes with Jon, and the intensity becomes too much. Jon lets the fantasy drift away as he bites down on his own fingers and strokes himself to completion. He falls asleep a few moments later, without even a stray thought about Ronan ‘knowing’ Eve-the-anthropologist.

\---

Tommy too spends the night imagining sex with Lovett, but for him it’s much less intentional. He started jerking off because he was drunk and sleepy and Lucca had magically stayed asleep when he carried her up to her dog bed and _his_ bed was pleasantly warm and the Headspace app had helped him clear his head and Hanna was not home. And then, the fantasies began creeping up on him, incoherent and jumbled. Before he even really notices what’s happening Tommy’s imagining his hand in Lovett’s hair, tugging at his curls as he pushes his cock into his mouth, then Tommy in a blindfold (a different one than the one he uses with Hanna, he tells himself), Lovett’s fingers in his mouth _and_ in his ass, then – most embarrassingly! – Tommy letting his hand run down Lovett’s back in public the way only Ronan’s hand ever gets to (for some variables of ‘public’, at least).

Context-less fragments and details keep coming to Tommy as his hand speeds up on his dick, unbidden but with crystal clarity, crowding his head the way his thoughts often do. And now it’s not just Lovett, not just fantasies, but memories as well: Hanna sitting on his face, moaning obscenely, Hanna’s hair enveloping him as they kiss, and kiss, and kiss, and then _Katie_ , touching her cheek where he’s just slapped her, then slapping him back, giggling. It’s a heady, guilty mix that Tommy probably shouldn’t think too much about (but definitely will).

And then Ronan’s there in Tommy’s head, too, full lips and blue eyes and the way he understand Tommy better than Tommy does himself, sometimes. In Tommy’s fantasy, now, he knows what Tommy wants before Tommy knows that he wants it, pushes Tommy’s knees up so he can rub his dick along the crease of Tommy’s ass…

But then Tommy’s orgasm starts building and it’s all Lovett again, that smug, self-satisfied smirk mocking Tommy and egging him on, like “Yeah, you could’ve had this, I would still let you have this if you only asked.” Tommy imagines Lovett – cock buried deep inside of Tommy, twisting Tommy’s nipples and laughing at the way Tommy flinches – and comes, cheeks hot with shame and guilt and want.

“Lovett,” he mumbles. “Jon.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have a [podsa tumblr](https://abriefshoutouttosomeminutiae.tumblr.com/), that I'm slowly getting better at using.


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